April 22, 2011

Women in Trouble (2009): D

A female-centric bit of Tarantino/Almodovar-ish nonsense, Women in Trouble offers a cornucopia of chatty intertwined tales concerning women whose common links are both their need to tell special someones how they really feel, and to engage in long conversations while dressed in bras and panties. Writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez’s story is structurally clichéd – what with his various players’ lives randomly intersecting during the course of one eventful day – but, worse still, his characters are uniformly unbelievable and two-dimensional, an issue compounded by the filmmaker’s serious consideration of their bland emotional plights. Porn star Elektra Luxx (Carla Gugino) is the center of this turgid saga, grappling with an unexpected pregnancy while trapped in an elevator with Doris (Connie Britton), both of whom promptly strip down to their skivvies (because of a heat wave) in a manner not unlike porn stars Bambi (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and Holly (Adrianne Palicki) while preparing to whore themselves out to a movie producer who – crime-comedy cliché alert! – is offed by mysterious baddies right before their tryst. Gutierrez’s fondness for having his leading ladies disrobe before thoughtfully discussing their problems or dealing with crises is driven less by the film’s phony sluttiness-as-female-empowerment intentions than by a more base desire to simply ogle. Yet even that isn’t nearly as frustrating as the drama’s simplistic psychologizing, lame cross-cutting (which is routinely accompanied by rapid-fire still-photo montages), and pitiful stabs at being risqué, which is epitomized by two separate incidents that posit oral sex as dangerous, as well as one woman’s trip down childhood-bestiality memory lane.